Fifty per cent of Americans are now “concerned believers” in global warming. That is the finding of a new Gallup “cluster analysis” of responses to a poll conducted this month. It is also a record, although the percentage was actually a pretty similar 49 per cent in 2001, when the data series began. Present analysis places 31 per cent of US adults in the “mixed middle” on climate change, and classifies 19 per cent as “cool sceptics”.

A Quinnipiac University poll conducted this month backs this up: 73 per cent of the registered voters polled said they were “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” about climate change, and 63 per cent said they did not think Donald Trump should “remove specific regulations intended to combat climate change”. Yet another set of polling data, from the Yale Programme on Climate Communication, found that in 2016 a majority of adults in every congressional district in the country thought the Government should limit carbon dioxide emissions from existing coal-fired power plants.

So why is it that the President signed an executive order yesterday that “begins unravelling a raft of rules and directives to combat climate change”, including limits on carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants? I guess you could attribute some of this disconnect between public opinion and executive action to the vagaries of the American electoral system, which often seems to promote extreme views over consensus-seeking and favours deep pockets over broad public sentiment. Then there is the President’s understandable distrust of polls, his campaign pledges to bring back coal — which he almost certainly will not be able to do, but maybe he figures he will get credit for trying — and the hard transition-team work that veteran anti-environmentalist Myron Ebell put in to shape administration policy on this topic.

But after looking through the polling data over the years, I have another thought that is not unrelated to the above reasons but seems worthy of separate consideration: most Americans really are not sure what to think about climate change. Yes, levels of concern are high right now, but that seems to be in large part a partisan reaction to who is in the White House. Just as climate-change sceptics grew in number in the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency, climate worriers are coming out of the woodwork with Trump.

Over the past couple of decades, about 25 per cent of Americans have consistently worried about climate change, and about 15 per cent consistently dismissed it. The other 60 per cent of the adult populace appears to be open to persuasion. Also, very few Americans see addressing climate change as their top priority. It shows up nowhere on Gallup’s regular tally of what people think is the most important issue facing the country, while environmental and pollution-related topics were named by only 2 per cent of those polled last month.

Here is another interesting polling result, from the Pew Research Centre: only 27 per cent of American adults agree with the statement that “almost all climate scientists agree that human behaviour is mostly responsible for climate change”. Now I guess we could quibble a little over the meaning of “almost all”, but it is well established that about 97 per cent of active climate scientists believe that human activity is the cause of recent global warming. This is in part testimony to the success of Ebell and his allies in deliberately sowing doubt. But it could also be a sign that the “scientific consensus” framing just intrinsically is not all that persuasive.

I will admit, I’m biased here: I wrote a book about a scientific consensus that has largely unravelled, and I have watched with fascination — and eaten with satisfaction — as the scientific consensus over the merits and demerits of carbohydrates and fats has pretty much reversed itself. So 97 per cent of scientists in a particular field believing something is not in itself all that persuasive to me.

What is persuasive? This is a topic I hesitate to weigh in on because people get so worked up about it and because I’m no expert. But here is what my thought process has looked like: more than a century ago, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius theorised that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from industrial emissions would cause global temperatures to rise. Since then, carbon dioxide concentrations have risen, and so have temperatures. That is not proof that the two are linked, but, over time, objections and alternatives to Arrhenius’s hypothesis have tended to fall by the wayside.

Remember when the satellite temperature series maintained by John Christy and Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama at Huntsville did not back up surface readings that showed rising temperatures? I do because I wrote an article about them for the Birmingham News in the early 1990s. Not long after that, the satellite temperatures began showing a clear upward trend. Remember the surface warming pause that lasted from the late 1990s to 2013? That seems to have ended, with new global temperature records set in 2014, 2015 and 2016. Remember the theory that increased sunspot activity was warming the Earth? That unravelled when new data showed that sunspot activity had not increased.

Global temperatures have been on an upward trend since the early 1900s. The best explanation available is that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have been the main cause. I am pretty sure a great majority of Americans would agree with those assertions.

Beyond that, there is lots of uncertainty and debate about what will happen next — whether warming is such a terrible thing, whether the positive impact of increased carbon dioxide concentrations on plant growth is something to cheer about, how to weigh time and uncertainty in climate cost/benefit analyses, and so on and on.

I pay more heed to the alarmists on climate change than I used to because it seems like they have been right more often than the sceptics have, but I get why people still have doubts and differing opinions, and why they struggle to assign a priority to the issue. This is an issue where it makes sense for views to fall along a continuum — and that seems to be exactly what the polls show is happening among American voters. Now if we could only get our politicians to think and talk that way, too.

• Justin Fox is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the editorial director of Harvard Business Review and wrote for Time, Fortune and American Banker. He is the author of The Myth of the Rational Market